I'm a restless VC hunting for cutting-edge technologies, maverick entrepreneurs and bold contrarian theses. I've funded or founded and serve on the Board of companies ranging from high-tech nuclear waste clean up (Kurion), breakthrough metamaterials with Bill Gates (Kymeta), 3D printing (Shapeways), emerging tech research (Lux Research) and much more. My life is the intersection of science and finance, and I believe the future is already here just unevenly distributed and that the best way to predict it is to invent it. I’m passionate about education reform and celebrating science and the right heroes. I Chair a Charter School (Coney Island Prep) in my native Coney Island Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell and am active term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. I hunt for low-probability high positive consequence outcomes (aka black swans) and contrarian takes on markets and technologies.

Entrepreneurial Fire: What Steve Jobs and Eccentric Artists Share

For any investor assessing innovation, creative destruction and disruptive technologies it’s a must to find the outliers. The standouts are not the technologies themselves but the zealous missionary people who conjure up the big new ideas and champion them to everyone else.

One strategy to find them early is to find the people who seem like their brains are on fire. Passion can be the best predictor of success in venture capital, where so much else is uncertain.

The same intensity celebrated in Steve Jobs can be seen in artists and musicians that straddle the thin line between eccentric genius and insanity.

I’ve found no other way to describe it when I see it.

The emanating noggin heat, a swell of creative energy swirling beautifully, barely contained, diluted and diverted only to attend to the exertion of effortful poise to sit still, keep it cool, act normal. You can see it leak through fidgety fingers, bouncing knees, swift speech, darting eyes, and vigorous gum chewing.

Whatever the muse, internally inspired or externally possessed, it’s mental energy physically presenting to a diagnosis centuries past as insanity, decades past as neuroticism, years past as hyperactivity and possibly redefined and reconsidered today as creative brilliance or dare one say genius.

A decade of daily doses of “Sit still!” and “Face forward!” may be enough to sap and suppress much that we celebrate of the curious scientist in the crib, the tinkering toddler exploring the world through play. Thankfully for the rest of us, a few of them slip through.

It’s been said that genius is recovery of childhood at will. And Aristotle said that no great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

“If you study the D.S.M. (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), you may notice that the distinguishing factors of several personality disorders — impulsivity, notions of grandiosity, preoccupation with ritual, perfectionism — also exist in the majority of high-functioning individuals. In this case, these traits do not lead to dysfunction and are not destructive. They are extremely potent tools for success.”

Surely you will have your own additions to this list but here are a few who have inspired me:

David Milch whose brain was surely on fire when he wrote Deadwood’s dialogue juxtaposing Victorian English and vile expletives; Shakespeare and sheriffs.

Or fictional FBI profiler, Will Graham, protagonist from the TV show Hannibal, whose brain is literally and figuratively on fire.

In art, pop-surrealist Robert Williams and the recently passed HR Giger both utilized the element of crazy to become influential. “My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy,” Giger famously said in a 1979 interview with Starlog magazine. “If they like my work they are creative … or they are crazy.”

Nikola Tesla played a role in the discoveries of electricity, radar, radio and robotics but was allegedly a neurotic OCD germaphobe, as was Darwin who also dreaded being around other people. Michelangelo was believed to be autistic, rarely spoke to others and reportedly had terrible personal hygiene. Not to mention Beethoven, who constantly had fits of mania and was believed to be bipolar.

Steve Jurvetson’s brain is on fire, deploying childlike wonder, curiosity and capital. Our own investment in Planet Labs followed Steve’s unconstrained youthful passion for rocketry, which led to desert launches with friends, SpaceX and Planet.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

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